Motorcycle Crash Causation Pilot Study Timeline/FOIA request.

On December 4th, 2009, we submitted a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request for the documents for the Westat contract with NHTSA.

We received a response on April 6th and we are publishing the entire content of the FOIA package. We redacted ET's address, but otherwise the entire response is included. It's a 3.8 MB .pdf file, contact us if you have trouble downloading it.

We are also told that the Westat technical report, submitted in December 2009, is expected to be available on the NHTSA website by May 1st.

Timeline

We created the following table, documenting the original project deliverables and tracking their escalating delays throughout revised scheduled in the eight amendments to the contract. It's a bit of a mess, not of our making, and we did our best to straighten it out a bit and collate it.

The Money Trail

The Westat contract amount was split into a fixed fee plus reimbursement for actual expenses. NHTSA redacted the split between the fixed fee and the actual costs under FOIA section (b) (2), but we note the original contract amount of $467,103, and the revision 5 amount of $527,098 to bring the final cost to $994,201. This is the same amount as the SAETEA-LU study funding for 2006. We would question how the April 23, 2008 revision 5 just happens to match the amount allocated in 2006, which is annotated in the SAETEA-LU document as actual funding for 2006. How did the Feds know in 2006 what the 2008 contract revision was going to call for? Or more likely, why was the costs plus fee amount in April 2008 calculated to be exactly the same as the 2006 funding?

We have one other verified amount, $150,440, which was mentioned in revision 5 as the actual amount paid under the contract up to February 29, 2008. At that point, only a few deliverables up to work plan, which were due by Oct 27 2005 under the initial contract were complete

Summary

Was there an attempt to bypass the intent of the study to be done at OSU by funneling almost half of the SAFETEA-LU funding to the NTHSA-controlled pilot study. We have a copy of the OECD guidelines and we will be examining items like the training costs and duration, which ended up being in excess of the initially contracted amount, which appeared to hew to the OECD requirements.

Here's the information, we'll have more in May when the final study report is released. The source for the table below, except where noted and linked, is the FOIA document, available for download here. Everything on this page is solid, verified fact taken directly from official documents, except as noted.

We should note that the successive and cumulative delays in the pilot project might have been caused by either party to the contract, or by outside forces including politics, lobbying and the issues caused by the reduction of SAFETEA-LU funding from the original $2.8M. The issues of matching funding required by the SAFETEA-LU act and the demands for additional funding by OSU may have factored in. But the pilot was clearly a disaster, fraught with delays and cost overruns, and it seems that funding was available by 2006 to pay for it.

Amendment 3 to the contract was signed, extending the contract for an additional 23 months. The termination date is moved from April 15, 2007 to the new end date of April 25 2008

This is the first contract amendment we received with that FOIA contract information. Presumably there were amendments 1 and 2 that we don't have. There was no change to the contract price in this change.

C.4.8 Westat recruits and trains investigators. Revision 5 changes the number of investigators to 'up to 4', but we believe three investigators were eventually recruited and trained by Dynamic Science.